Stage Frights

The title of this shrewdly produced series of nine spooky short plays raises a question: Who is the scariest of “The Scariest”?

Is it the strangler in Ana Marie Healy’s Hitchcockian “Delightful,” the dead child knocking at the blood-red door in Mark Schultz’s nerve-jangling “Third Wish,” or maybe the ghoulish father in the shadows in Laura Schellhardt’s “Apothecary’s Daughter”?

The directors, Ari Edelson and Meredith McDonough, nicely establish a darkly nightmarish environment inside a basement space at the Theaters at 45 Bleecker. Circled around the audience is a translucent curtain through which various sinister forces can be seen lurking, waiting to pounce. It’s like watching a play inside the shower at the Bates Motel.

Mr. Schultz (“Deathbed”) provides the highlights with two completely different riffs on “The Monkey’s Paw,” W. W. Jacobs’s classic tale of how being granted three wishes can be more of a curse than a blessing. His “Finally,” featuring Rebecca Brooksher (“Dying City”) as a fatally attracted love interest, is an eerie story single-mindedly leading to one fateful joke, while “Third Wish,” a taut and skillfully written two-character piece with Angel Desai and Andy Grotelueschen, updates “The Monkey’s Paw” into a tense, Albee-esque drama. Call it “The Play About the Living Dead Baby.”

Evenings of one-acts are almost always mixed bags, and some entries here, like Gary Sunshine’s muddled fairy tale, “The Names of Foods,” fall flat. But the producers  the Exchange (the former Jean Cocteau Rep)  were smart enough to finish with “Revelations.” This sly, fantastical and delightfully unpredictable meta-play by Kristin Newbom touches on themes of free will and the thin line between art and life. It begins with a writer ominously discussing her rage before pivoting into a truly creepy sendup of Scientology that, to my mind, settles the “scariest” debate. The most frightening thing? Tom Cruise.